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The recently permitted unlicenced use of the regulated ultra-wideband (UWB) radio spectrum (regulated first by the US FCC in 2002 and subsequently by the standardisation bodies of EU and other major countries) provides wireless ad hoc networks a cheap and promising air-interface technology for their adopted wireless data links, thus offering the potential to greatly boost their applications. The impacts of such UWB data links, mainly the more likely adopted impulse-based UWB data links for low data rate applications, on the extensively developed cooperative wireless ad hoc networks are investigated. First, the authors investigate the diversity order of data transfer of each impulse-based UWB data link working in a corresponding fading channel, and give an approximate relationship between the diversity order and the channel model parameters (here the Saleh-Valenzuela model parameters); Secondly, the authors develop efficient cooperative and decentralised diversity schemes that can utilise the widely spread and independently distributed multiple paths of the fading UWB channels. Performance analysis and simulation studies show that proposed decentralised cooperative beamforming schemes can achieve full diversity and are more efficient than their decentralised cooperative routing counterparts.